eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

"A
dragon calls from moldy black
And threatens death and will not slack
E-r it has me in its jaws
And mauls this maid in scaly maws
I cannot rest: I cannot lie
But rather turn and toss and sigh
In dread, and woe, and sleepless night . . . etc."

With
Boxers 'bandoned but broadsword buckled
Our love lorn hero on chiv'lry suckled
Descends the stair in silent dread
To dismal dark from balmy bed.
Yet faintly now two flights below
He hears her sweetly, soft, and low

"The
dragon must be done and first
But when its done, mydear,
. . . I thirst."

Aye!

The
dragon shrieks upon the moors
Rages, wrenches, threatens, wars.
The dragon's laire, a'hiss and roar
Our knight descends to chore his chore
With sconce bedimmed and sword before
Our knight descends to chore his chore
And great the battle with dragon rages
The talons take their grisly wages
But greater still Sir Husbain's furry
To save the beloved wrack and worry.

Ahhh
. . .

Now
from the mist and up the ladder
Upon the stair the steel a'clatter
Up, up, to tower's lofty heights
From dampest depths and dreadful sights
With hand becrimsoned and chalice full
Back to linens, flannel, wool
And through the bedroom door in death wail weeping
Beholds his fairest restful . . . sleeping.

I was lying on my back directly under a winter tree the other day. I looked up to the sky. One azure blue sky shattered (or so it seemed) by the branches, limbs, and twigs of the tree. Shattered into pieces too numerous to count. "Shattered sky," I thought. "Shattered into as many pieces as I am." "shattered like the coyote in a road runner cartoon
just waiting for the right moment in time to separate
into pieces." And yet the brokenness was all illusion. The sky was whole and the tree whole And I am whole. "Only lightning can shatter sky," I thought And sky heals in less than a second.

Wire
in the Rings

On
the very edge of a flood plain behind my fathers house
A hedge row from long ago betrays the scars of former farming days.
Barbed wire, once strung with abandon in places where
No one but cows and fence menders once walked
Lies now exposed, unexposed, and rusted.
Wicked raspy wire wound around the living trees
Makes one think of souls left unforgiven and unforgiving.
And one tree in particular stands near the new shed
Weeping with its wound.
Wind in its leaves sounds like wishing
That wire were biodegradable.
The tree grows around its irritant like
A soul around unrequited injustice.
Like the memory of a slander never retracted.
The unnaturalness of it is arresting.
There is no infection here. No.
But, rusted metal will be part of the rings of this tree's personality
Forever.

One
would have to destroy that tree
To remove this long steel splinter-noose now.

Would that that farmer had taken an afternoon
To free his land when he sold his cows.

12/24/2007

I would love to see Hitler and Stalin meet each other in hell. Here is what Adolf Hitler had to say about Stalinist Russia in Mein Kampf:

"The present rulers of Russia have no idea of honorably entering into an alliance, let alone observing one.Never forget that the rulers of present-day Russia are common blood-stained criminals; that they are the scum of humanity which, favored by circumstances, overran a great state in a tragic hour, slaughtered and wiped out thousands of her leading intelligentsia in wild blood lust, and now for almost ten years have been carrying on the most cruel and tyrannical regime of all time. Furthermore, do not forget that these rulers belong to a race which combines, in a rare mixture, bestial cruelty and an inconceivable gift for lying, and which today more than ever is conscious of a mission to impose its bloody oppression on the whole world. [antisemitism deleted] . . . And you do not make pacts with anyone whose sole interest is the destruction of his partner. Above all, you do not make them with elements to whom no pact would be sacred, since they do not live in this world as representatives of honor and sincerity, but as champions of deceit, lies, theft, plunder, and rapine. If a man believes that he can enter into profitable connections with parasites, he is like a tree trying to conclude for its own profit an agreement with a mistletoe." Mein Kampf

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. It is no wonder that Hitler took the world by surprise in 1939 when he signed a non-aggression treaty with Stalin, freeing the Nazi army up entirely for its attacks into Poland and Western Europe. II find it impossible not to assume that Stalin's intention was to watch Hitler bleed himself to death in a war with England and France, and hopefully America while he bided his time and waited for the right moment to break the treaty. Did Hitler know that? Of course he did. His propaganda justification for the surprise attack on the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) would have no doubt had some kernel of truth in it. But he absolutely knew that Stalin wasn't ready for a blow to the back of his trusting head. And he made SURE that Stalin was not as ready as he might have been.

"In preparation for the attack, Hitler moved 3.2 million German soldiers and about 1 million Axis soldiers to the Soviet border, launched many aerial surveillance missions over Soviet territory, and stockpiled materiel in the East. The Soviets were still taken by surprise, mostly due to Stalin's belief that the Third Reich was unlikely to attack only two years after signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet leader also believed that the Nazis would likely finish their war with Britain before opening a new front. He refused to believe repeated warnings from his intelligence services on the Nazi buildup, fearing the reports to be British misinformation designed to spark a war between the Nazis and the USSR. The German government also aided in this deception, telling Stalin that the troops were being moved to take them out of range of British bombers. The Germans also explained that they were trying to trick the British into thinking they were planning to attack the Soviet Union, while in fact the troops and supplies were being stockpiled for an invasion of Britain. As a result, Stalin's preparations against a possible German invasion in 1941 were half-hearted." Wikipedia article on Operation Barbarossa

The fact is that by this time, Hitler had elevated Machiavellianism and Nietzschism to religious creeds. All of this deception was sanctified by its ends in his mind, the Aryanization and Nazification of Eastern Europe. In short, ethnic cleansing as a religious duty to the Gods of Darwin and the thousand year Riech.

This is not the image of a man who does things that he suspects that he will have to apologize for someday.

The problem with secret surprise attacks of course is NOT that they don;t work. They do. The problem is that they do not work OFTEN. Indeed, they do not work well more than two or three times. Then people know you are capable of it and the capacity for doing it effectively decreases exponentially. One mistakes the original success for an attribute of the tactic. People who devise surprise attacks on other people should take note.

Question for comment: Have you ever been "Operation Barbarossa'ed"? How does one protect themselves?

12/23/2007

"Next to a circus, there aint nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas Spirit."Kin Hubbard

"ROCK SPRINGS, Wyo. — A woman stabbed
her husband with a kitchen knife following an argument that began when
she accused him of opening a Christmas present early, authorities said
Friday.

Misty Johnson, 34, was arrested and charged with
aggravated assault and battery, a felony, and misdemeanor domestic
battery. Her husband, Shawn Fay Johnson, 34, was treated at a hospital
for a wound to the chest, police said." [... more]

Its beginning to look a lot like Christ-mas ... "Suffering" the Buddhists say, "is the difference between the way things ARE and the way you want them to be." And, for that reason, many people suffer during Christmas holidays. My friend, Chris, the lawyer, tells me that domestic family legal problems are aggravated during the holiday seasons. For many, the expectations of their families rise around Christmas while often the realities don't ... ergo, people suffer. "Christmas is a holiday that persecutes the lonely, the frayed, the rejected" as Jimmy Cannon once said.

Question for comment: How does one keep from being a statistic. Thats the question I have posed for myself today.

12/22/2007

Kitty Fane:
[about Wan Xi] I had no idea you had so much affection for her.
Waddington:
What makes you think I do?
Kitty Fane:
I can see it in your eyes. I wonder what she sees in you.
Waddington:
[In Chinese] What do you see in me?
Wan Xi:
[to Waddington] You're a good man.
Waddington:
She says I'm a good man.
Kitty Fane:
As if a women has ever loved a man for his virtue.

It is the end of a long day of a long week of a long semester of a long year, a year in which there were many tests and many failures. And of all those failures, none are so obvious as the inability or unwillingness to love people as they are, my son for one. I find it incredibly difficult to be a person of virtue when it seems like no one reciprocates affection. Yesterday, he would not share a bite of chocolate that he had gotten at a party and I found myself getting sullen about it. Really, affection makes no sense anyway, at least not from a mathematical sense. It just seems so rare to find a relationship where affection comes anywhere near reciprocality anyway. Why do we even expect it? Its as dumb as expecting Western Australia to have the same climate as Vermont simply because it is on ht opposite side of the globe. People are different and an assortment of complex character traits will call forth their affection, our own affection being only one of them, and maybe a minor one at that.

In tonight's movie, The Painted Veil, A young woman marries impulsively, more as a way to get away from something, as a way to escape to a more exciting life perhaps, than as a response to a man she has come to know and love. In short, she marries him before she loves him though he marries after.

"If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him then it's *his* fault not hers" she says in her defense.

It is not a good recipe for a marriage. "It was silly of us to look for qualities in each other that we never had." he later admits.
What saves their marriage is simply geography and misfortune. They have moved to a placewhere she cannot get away, and where the traits that serve him so ill in "civilized society" make his specialness as a human being so much more self-evident.

I wonder how many people there are that we never come to really appreciate because we never see them in the context where they shine? I wonder if everyone in this world just looks like coal until that one moment or place in life where the ray of grace shines directly through their particular set of gifts? The following conversation from the movie was the one that spoke to me in particular.

"I think what you are doing for instance is incredibly noble."You used to feel contempt for me. Don't you still?Walter. I can't believe that you with all your cleverness should have such little sense of proportion. We humans are more complex than your silly little microbes. We're unpredictable. We make mistakes and we disapoint.""Yes. We certainly do. ""I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I am not the perfect young woman that you want me to be. I'm just ordinary. I never tried to pretend that I was anything else.""No. You certainly didn't." "I liked theater and dancing and playing tennis. I like games. I like men who play games. God forgive me. Thats the way I was brought up." "Well I play a pretty fierce hand of bridge. "Ah well, thats bloody exciting. ... and you ... you dragged me around all those interminable galleries in Venice blathering on about the miracles of the canals and the flushing of the lagoons system or some such nonsense. Honestly, I would have been much happier playing golf at Sandwich. "I suppose you're right. It was silly of us to look for qualities in each other that we never had. Yes. Yes it was."

This is the moment when the two main characters really begin to look at the qualities in each other that they had not seen before because they were too busy looking for the qualities they hoped to find. NPR interview says the following about the author of the book upon which this movie is made:

"I think what Somerset Maugham is really getting at with this title, The Painted Veil is that all of us fall in love with the illusions we have of a person as much as who they really are and THAT is in some sense, the painted veil that is in front of our vision of the truth and when our illusions get torn away it can be a process of disenchantment."

Maugham himself once confessed:

”I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me and
when people have loved me I have been embarrassed… In order not to hurt
their feelings, I have often acted a passion I did not feel.”

In the movie, the Mother Superior of the orphanage in China where Kitty works tells her "When love and duty are one, grace is within you."

12/21/2007

Sometimes finding one's way to forgiveness is like salmon making their way up a fish lader. Until you get there,, it is entirely possible that you might stop to rest from the effort and find yourself at the bottom again. Just when I am almost there some days ... I wake up to find myself so far down the ladder, I wonder if I have ever started up. Some days, I just want to turn around and see what it would feel like to swim downstream with the anger instead of against it. Does one have just as much moral right to swim downstream as up in this situations? is one way good and the other bad? or does an ooffended person have a right to do either?

According to Subkoviac et al. (1992), 'Forgiveness is the overcoming of resentment toward an offender, not by denying ourselves the right to such feelings, but by endeavoring to view the offender withbenevolence, compassion and even love, while recognizing that he or she has abandoned the right to them'. The important points of this definition are as follows: (a) one who forgives has suffered a deep hurt, thus showing resentment, (b) the offended person has a moral right to resentment, but overcomes it nonetheless, (c) a new response to the other accrues, including compassionand love, and (d) this loving response occurs despite the realization that there is no obligation to love the offender' (Subkoviac et al., 1992: 3).

12/19/2007

I am not sure how many 12-14 hour days I have had lately but I can't remember what time to myself feels like anymore. I am sitting in the library at the college responding to those submitting their final exams and final papers. All my colleagues have gone home for the day and I wonder what drives me to feel like all these students deserve feedback. I don't know. It just seems like a human rights issue. If someone puts in effort for me, it seems like they deserve to know whether they did or did not meet the expectations I had. It seems like I WANT them to know how they educated me, inspired me, stumped me, or made me think.

"A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered
a mind that startled us."

I feel like people need to know that their ideas mattered to someone ... that their intellectual work doesn't just get fed into a steam powered paper-grader. I think I need to sign up for another face to face class sometime. I miss knowing if students like me.

Question for Comment: Do you work harder than you are paid to? Why or why not?

12/15/2007

"History is ending, because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley. And as the inevitable chaostrophe approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble, it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa, 15,000 years ago, rocked in cradle of the great horned mushroom goddess before history. Before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism. Before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us. Because the secret faith of the 20th century is not modernism. The secret faith of the 20th century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the Paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock and roll, and Catastrophe Theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom-dotted plains of Africa, where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it chose that the way out is back, and that the future is a forward escape into the past." Terence McKenna

So ... if we go back to the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago ... we will find people who wouldn't trade their lives for ours? How long were they living? What diseases were afflicting them? What were their children dying from? What freedoms did they have that we lack? What happinesses were their women and children experiencing that ours don't? What fears of the divine, of nature, of wild animals, of their fellow man were they subject to?

Question for comment: Is it my job as a history teacher to tell my students that their lives suck when compared to savanna-dwelling hunter gatherers?

12/14/2007

Harry Potter:
This connection between me and Voldemort... what if the reason for it
is that I am becoming more like him? I just feel so angry, all the
time. What if after everything that I've been through, something's gone
wrong inside me? What if I'm becoming bad?

Sirius Black:
I want you to listen to me very carefully, Harry. You're not a bad
person. You're a very good person, who bad things have happened to.
Besides, the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters. We've
all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we
choose to act on. That's who we really are.

Three boulders roll down a steep hill. One of them is the desire to give to someone. One is the desire to receive from someone. These pick up momentum and continue to roll long after that someone has left. The boulders eventually come to a stop in a field of that "someone's" indifference, apathy, and distance. Parts of the boulders have been broken off in the violent descent to where they have come to rest. They will never be the size they once were. If they roll again, they will never roll quite right. The thought of trying to roll them back up the hill is, quite frankly daunting. It will be the third or fourth time. The third boulder is either grief or anger or pain and it continues to roll. Its owner continues to stand in front of it and try to stop it from hurting anyone. He is covered with bruises from trying. All he manages to do is redirect it left to right and left. The one who has left thinks that this boulder is being pushed by the one who was left but she is wrong about that. She thinks he threw shrapnel at her but it was really just the parts of his heart and lungs that blew off when he was struck trying to protect her from the third boulder.

Is a person who fails to save another person from his own anger heroic in any way? Or is he just pathetic?

Question for comment: I wonder if the power of the human heart to heal is vastly over-rated or underrated?